In an adversarial legal system the quality of advocacy directly affects the outcome, and hence justice. This blog is for everyone -however they serve our legal system - who is committed to improving the teaching of advocacy skills and ethics so that parties and the community are well served by persuasive and ethical advocates.

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Saturday, January 26, 2013

Professor Louis Virelli, a resident lurker on this blog, asked that I pass along the following book review.

Enjoy!

Charlie

Hello,
everyone. I wanted to pass along an
abbreviated version of a book review that is forthcoming in the March 2013
issue of the NACDL magazine, The Champion.
I think the book will be intriguing to anyone with an interest in
advocacy or constitutional law, especially as either of those relates to jury
trials:

Andrew Ferguson’s engaging and
impassioned new book Why Jury Duty
Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Jury-Duty-Matters-Constitutional/dp/0814729037) poses and answers a series of questions
that are crucial to every citizen’s understanding of the role and purpose of
jury service in our constitutional democracy.
Ferguson, a former public defender in Washington, D.C. and currently an
Assistant Professor at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of
the District of Columbia, offers an intelligent and skillfully written account
of jury service that speaks to the prospective juror in all of us, while at the
same time offering lessons in the history and constitutional significance of the
jury that will be enlightening for lawyers and lay readers alike.

On the very surface, Ferguson provides
an inspirational primer for jury service.
He speaks directly to the hypothetical reader in the juror waiting room,
explaining their role in the process and how they should expect their time to be
spent, from voir dire through trial
and deliberation. Interwoven with his account
of how serving on a jury looks and feels is a compelling historical and
constitutional case for the profound meaning
of jury service both to individual citizens and our constitutional democracy
more broadly. Ferguson makes this
connection by drawing parallels between several of our most cherished constitutional
principles (citizen participation, fairness, equality, civic republicanism,
liberalism, deliberative democracy, tolerance and accountability) and the history
and modern functionality of the jury. Finally,
he makes the scholarly case for treating jury service as a microcosm of
constitutional citizenship, in the process offering a sophisticated and
compelling call to action for people who write and teach about juries to
consider how the historical features of American juries can and should inform
the modern judicial system.

The
end result is a clear and highly accessible account of our democratic
government and the jury’s place within it.
Readers whose only experience with constitutional law is having received
a jury summons in the mail will feel like they have been educated not only in how
to be a better juror, but in how that experience can make them a better
American. Lawyers and judges will
appreciate the book as a platform from which they can spread the word about the
benefits of an institution that is critical to their professional mission, and law
professors and commentators will view this book as an opportunity to recast an
oft-maligned but fundamental institution of the American judicial system in a
new and more fruitful light.